Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.